Some people have asked me why I am not dancing all over Governor DeSantis grave on social media like other Florida progressives/liberals. The reason is while Nikki Haley is still in race at this moment, she won’t be much longer (funny how the so-called “establishment” candidate has so few endorsements while elected officials in the GOP flock to scream “ME TOO!: in backing Trump…seems misogyny always wins in american politics), a Trump renomination is inevitable.

And given the extreme weakness of the Democratic Party in large parts of the country (the Democrats can hardly be called a national party anymore), I think Trump’s return to the White House might be a fait accompli (I hope I am dead wrong and lots can change by the fall, but I think a lot of Democrats are completely divorced from reality right now about public opinion among voters outside of the political chattering classes). Be scared – very scared.

Like it or not, Donald Trump is one of the most prolific vote-getters in recent American history. And his presence has turned a once conservative party into a mish-mash of populism, grievance culture and inconsistency.

DeSantis lost badly because in the populist environment he jumped into, GOPers didn’t want a reluctant or fake populist.

Before DeSantis really got moving Trump hit him on two key issues that reinforced that DeSantis was more of a Herbert Hoover than either a Teddy Roosevelt or Donald Trump.

• Insurance in Florida – Trump hammered this to the point where he sounded like he was doing the job of Florida Democrats for them.
• Social Security – Trump’s “pudding ad” got the usual attention from a media obsessed with gossip, but what they missed was Trump was NAILING DeSantis as an aloof guy who could not be trusted with entitlement programs.

After that DeSantis attempted to double-down on his “anti-woke” messaging. DeSantis wrongly assumed race-based issues (outside of immigration) are motivators for working class Trump voters. They aren’t- who they do motivate is GOP donors and the the managerial class within the Republican Party. The Elon Musk’s, David Sacks and Peter Thiel’s of the world are obsessed with race-based issues and buzz-words like CRT and “woke.” Twitter is obsessed with these debates but the real world, real America left or right doesn’t live on Twitter (progressives need to learn this lesson also- Biden never gets nominated in 2020 if Twitter was it).

The reality is that while many GOP rank-in-file voters might be mildly racist, obsessions with graduate classes on African-American studies and diversity training at some giant Silicon Valley tech company has no tangible impact on them. They really don’t give a damn and I think most didn’t know what the heck DeSantis was talking about. Most are just trying to get by, and have bought into Donald Trump’s nationalistic and horrible economic plan to throw up tariffs on any foreign made product and subsidize domestic industry. DeSantis had no retort for this- in fact he had no economic talking points whatsoever.

On the issue of COVID-19 while DeSantis views (which I strongly disagree with) were huge contributors to his 2022 reelection landslide, those were probably better general election issues. The reality of pandemics is it hurts the working class and minorities disproportionately as well as those in urban areas, the same places DeSantis has openly expressed contempt for. But beyond that, many of those types of voters who did cross over for him in 2022 here in Florida, don’t vote in GOP primaries.